At the 2014 Tony Awards, Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," directed by former Radcliffe Fellow John Tiffany, won best lighting design for Natasha Katz. The play also was a top candidate for best revival.

Evolutionary biologists have long held up songbirds, particularly the Galapagos finches first described by Charles Darwin, as an example of natural selection at work. In order to exploit different environments and food sources, the birds developed a startling variety of beak shapes — from short, blunt beaks ideal for cracking seeds and nuts to long, slender beaks designed to sip nectar from flowers. The assumption was that natural selection was the primary, if not the sole, cause for the variation.

"I believe that the engineering of life is the technology of this century," declared panelist Pam Silver, RI '12, Adams professor of biochemistry and systems biology at Harvard Medical School, during the "What is Life?" talk on Radcliffe Day 2014.

During the Radcliffe Day panel on gender and the business of fiction, panelist Elisabeth Schmitz '86 of Grove Atlantic said, "The question that comes up again and again is whether or not a large sample of women writers are, by default of their gender, being passed over as serious writers and their work perceived as a separate genre: 'women's fiction.'"

More than 950 alumnae/i, fellows, faculty, students, University leaders, and friends came to Radcliffe Yard to celebrate 15 years of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and 135 years of Radcliffe.

"I worry that a complacency is emerging in our society about the place of women, a complacency that too easily forgets that things were once otherwise and there is still a considerable way to go in American society," said President Drew Faust. Faust was honored with the Radcliffe Medal.

Celebrating its 15th anniversary, the Radcliffe Institute honored this year’s recipient of the Radcliffe Medal—Drew Faust—with a panel discussion that explored “why and how the world’s greatest democracy has long struggled over which of its citizens can vote.”